


Oaths Unspoken

by lissomelle



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-24
Updated: 2013-07-24
Packaged: 2017-12-21 05:10:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/896173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lissomelle/pseuds/lissomelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wakes up.</p>
<p>This is the miraculous thing -- not the briny air that he gasps into his lungs or the sun overhead or the waves bobbing beneath him -- but the fact that he resurfaces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oaths Unspoken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [encroix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/encroix/gifts).



> Written for the prompt " _Raleigh thinks Mako is hurt/dead and subsequently has a proper freak out but she isn't dead_ " (at the [_sending all my love along the wire_ ficathon](http://lissomelle.livejournal.com/134358.html)).

He wakes up.

This is the miraculous thing -- not the briny air that he gasps into his lungs or the sun overhead or the waves bobbing beneath him -- but the fact that he resurfaces. He'd triggered the reaction, blown out his other body's heart. Closed his eyes. Fallen. (Just there, on the periphery, on the backs of his eyelids, is the flash of the console counting down seconds.)

And he still woke up.

He sits up, coughing. Dots scatter and blur across his vision as his oxygen-deprived brain tries to focus.

_Where is she?_

He turns too fast looking for her pod, his body protesting. Pulse hammering his head like an anvil. He still doesn't slow or stop until he spots her floating just a hundred feet away. Gripping the side of his own pod for balance, he manages to half-yell her name. By his hip, the built-in comm chirps.

"Raleigh? Becket, do you copy?"

"I'm here. Mako --"

"We're not getting a read on her vitals, but stay--"

He dives straight into the water, loses the rest. The speaker keeps bleating futilely as he swims away. His strokes are sluggish, the current stronger than he anticipated, but he cuts through the waves until he reaches her. _Not fast enough, never fast enough_. He hauls himself up by the floats buoying her pod.

She must've broken the ocean surface at least a few minutes ahead of him, but it's all wrong. _No. No no no._

 

 

He'd felt it before he saw it, when her oxygen began to thin. Her despair had fiercely gripped his mind, as raw and dark as the grief beginning to seep around the edges of the Drift. She wanted to be there to finish it. She wanted. Oh, she wanted. He saw flickers, images flashing as she thought them. And, with the same steely self-control, let them go. One by one. Mother. Father. Stacker. (He'd stuttered over the lump in his throat, the glass in his chest when she came to him and stopped. Held on. Held tight. _I always had bad timing._ )

He didn't even think before unhooking his oxygen.

_It's done_ , he'd thought to her. _We did it._ You _did it_. (They weren't just reassuring words. But her uncertainty pierced him to the point where he had to say it aloud. To tell her the truth: that the rest was clean-up, that it was easy. That there was so much more ahead. And she deserved to go on.)

 

 

She feels small in his arms somehow, and he hates it. Fucking _hates_ it, because she's filled his existence since he stepped onto that helipad, and everything about even the idea of her being small feels wrong. Her absence from his brain gapes like an open wound, and he can't stop holding her, smoothing his free hand over her hair, pressing their foreheads together, so close that the litany of her name falling from his lips tumbles directly onto hers. She doesn't open her eyes. A strangled sound rips from his throat. He shifts her in his arms to bury his face in her shoulder. _No._

She coughs.

"Raleigh?"

Somewhere far away, the comm in her pod is probably blaring. Neither of them notice it.


End file.
